


The Last, Best Locked Door

by CytosineSkald



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 15:31:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12192645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CytosineSkald/pseuds/CytosineSkald
Summary: They flirt as they always have -- by keeping just out of reach. He runs with gods and monsters, saves the literal world and stares into the eyes of titans without blinking. But she can still make him smile as he runs after her on a rooftop, grasping at air and old laughter. Half the fun is in the chase.





	The Last, Best Locked Door

**Author's Note:**

> :) Hope y'all enjoy?

She runs, breathless, across rooftops, feeling her legs, feeling twists of muscle and the shift of gravel under her feet. This is her playground, her home turf. Rooftops and fire escapes, AC units hung out of windows and traffic sooty below. She’s taken something. It doesn’t matter what she’s taken. It’s worthless. It’s invaluable. It can’t be replaced. It’s replaceable as a Walmart trinket. It doesn’t matter. She’s taken something, and she runs. She runs because he’ll chase her.

She turns her head on a straightaway and catches a flutter of cape out of the corner of her eye.

A duck and a weave around satellite dishes pointed just so, every dish a reflection of itself in different sizes, shapes, all pointing the same angle. Catch the satellite as it hangs in space, geosynchronous, holding one place over the earth, spinning with it and never seeing the other side. A forest of dishes laid out on a rooftop and she pirouettes around them -- a spin and a duck and another turn and a weave. The sound of gravel skittering behind her makes her heart leap adrenalin-fast. It’s a dance. Not a waltz, not quite. There’s never been anything  _ stately _ or  _ aristocratic _ between them, though she knows new world noblesse is ground into the lines of his face as much as any old world aristocrat could have. Like crystal chandeliers ground and poured into his blood until it grits through his heart. No, it’s not a waltz. Nothing that could show up in one of the old manor-crowd’s gilded Hall of Mirrors. It’s not quite a tango, either. A tango is too pinned-down, too  _ clean _ in as much as it’s also something quite besides. Theirs is something else. Something closer to the dirt and the gravel. They spin and swerve and it’s as much hunt as dance, old as stones and caves and spears, ancient and present and it thrums through her blood like Gotham isn’t an ossuary built up and up and up into claws reaching for sky. It’s a persistence hunt, humanity’s greatest specialty, and there’s nothing else quite like shaking a determined hunter. He’s the most determined hunter there is.

She ducks under a reaching gauntlet, (a  _ gauntlet! _ ) something old, something that should be shining metal and Agincourt-weathered, but is vantablack shadow, a hole in the universe, something for entropy to leak from and shadow to desire. She ducks and leaves him raking his fingers through cold air and old laughter. In the moment, fleeting, that she pivots on a heel, she knows she catches a grin on his face, all teeth and harsh as it is joyful. When she’s on a roll - when she’s  _ really _ on a roll - she’s been known to give him a tap between the shoulder blades with a well-aimed claw as she pirouettes past. He’s too close, now. Too able to sweep an arm back and catch her.

Can’t have that.

It’s a persistence hunt, but she’s no prey. A predator hunts a predator in a kind of cannibalistic mating dance. Blood and dirt and teeth and claw. There’s yelling and circling and laughing and fighting and running, always running, always chasing, and never quite touching -- not in the ways that count, not in the ways that could really hurt, that could cripple. They flirt as they always have -- by keeping just out of reach. She won’t say it’s fear because she’s fearless,  _ he’s _ fearless, but they’re predators, and they know how to grasp the stench of it out of the air. He’s a different kind of predator, she’s not stupid. He runs with gods and monsters, saves the literal world and stares into the eyes of titans without blinking. He gets lodged back in time like a shard of fine china caught in the throat until it bleeds, and time coughs him back forward. He’s so much bigger than her, stronger, faster,  _ fearless _ , but all she has to do is  _ take _ something. She takes something and she knows he’ll come back to her.

She doesn’t do it for him, of course. Not really. There’s a thrill with knowing just how to pick a lock, just how to make sure that no door is really ever closed. No window is barred. The city becomes an open basket, a picnic, and a hearth with no locks, no forbidden places, nowhere that could tell you -- really tell you -- that you weren’t allowed in. And how do you prove to yourself you can do a thing if you don’t give yourself a present? A little present. Someone had crackled out of a TV set once that it’s important to give yourself presents -- he’d sounded like coffee and David Lynch blue smoke and red rooms. She didn’t keep the presents, but she knew they were there, and the papers would talk.

Of course the Bat had a place somewhere in the city. Somewhere she wasn’t sure how to get to. Somewhere she wasn’t, ostensibly, allowed in. That’s part of what made him so much  _ fun _ . He chased her, and he held the last key in the city dangling over her head like mistletoe. Magic mistletoe. She wanted to catch it and swallow, even knowing it was poison, that having the last best closed door opened to her would rot her from the inside out. He’s too good a man to let her, but too good a monster to keep it out of reach. He chased her, and he tried to take away the presents for herself, the little proofs of entry she’d made. That was fine. The fun wasn’t in the shiny things draped over her neck, it was in the  _ doing _ . He’d take her presents and he’d dangle mistletoe keys from his lips, and temptation would be  _ vast _ .

But this chase wasn’t there yet.

She swings from a gargoyle’s neck, falls a storey and rolls to her feet. She can hear him  _ thud _ behind her, far more solid than a Gotham wraith should be. That’s less fun, sometimes. Ventures into dangerous territory, territory that threatens the arm’s length flirtation, the sevillanas dance of circling and circling and never touching in ways that mattered. Ventures into worrying about old wounds strained, and every venture into that territory comes with a misstep -- a slowed reaction, a stumble, a hesitation. That’s not what this is about. This is about playing not who they are, but who they’re supposed to be. No hesitation, no  _ fear _ . There’s what she’s taken, and there’s where she’s going, and there’s the knowledge that she can make a man who makes God blink first smile in the pursuit. He shoots a line that wings her shoulder, and she swipes a thin scratch into his cheek. It’s blood, it’s dirt and teeth and claws and it’s not  _ nice _ , but it’s what they have. Something that makes Gotham open her maw and laugh, pull them down into her belly to stew, pitcher-plant deadly and beautiful-ugly.

He catches her, as he often catches her. Sometimes it’s downtown, sometimes it’s on a two-storey in the East End, a Bowery tenement or a Diamond District high-rise. Sometimes she lets him win, sometimes she thinks he lets her win. It’s as much a game to him as it is to her -- it has to be. He keeps playing. This time it’s his turn to win. The scuffle is short and neither of their hearts are really in it, and she can see him trying not to smile. She’s trying just as hard. They engage in the usual smalltalk. --  _ Give it back. Make me. Give it back. Say please. _ \-- The social niceties. --  _ I’m warning you, Catwoman. Oh, you’re  _ warning _ me - I’m shaking.  _ \-- The appeals. --  _ You’re better than this _ .  _ Am I? I believe you can be.  _ \-- And the banter. --  _ You need a Boy Wonder to back you up here, your dialogue is really suffering _ . _ He’d say you’re going to hurt all one of my feelings with words like that _ .  _ And you’d say? I’d say it doesn’t matter when I’ve already caught the purrpetrator. Oh a pun, he IS human! _ \-- But in the end he’ll have whatever useless trinket or priceless heirloom she’d taken tipped into his palms. A cracker-jack toy plinking into a gauntlet, or a sapphire parure a pool of starlight in his hands.

And then he ruins it, as he often ruins it. Sometimes he does, and sometimes she does. This time it’s him. That moment when he steps that half-step closer, close enough to feel heat through kevlar, and the pseudonyms drop away with the masks. They aren’t who they’re supposed to be, they’re who they are. He’s not Gotham’s will to survive made manifest, he’s just a man. A man she knows has kind eyes behind whiteout lenses. Too kind. The sort of kind that chafes and leaves her balking because it can’t be real, she’s never met anyone where it was real. The sort of kind that makes her bare her teeth and step backward because a smile always came before a slap, always. But it doesn’t, hasn’t ever. The scowl came from him first, the baring of teeth before a lunge, a predator’s snarl before a predator’s snap. Honest. Bloody teeth and bruises. Things she understood. Those came long before anything else. He catches her wrist like he catches everything else, and holds it gentle, and if her back wasn’t against a wall already she’d have backed away -- so instead she looks up, swipes a gloved palm over the bloody cheek she made.  _ You’re getting slow, old man _ .  _ Maybe I let you do it _ . It smears across his skin in a painted arc and comes away sticky and she knows he’s ruined it when he lets himself tip his face to press into that same palm.

It hurts when he does that and sighs, lets his shoulders drop. It  _ hurts _ and it’s not fun anymore, and it’s too close, too much of  _ something _ that she can’t have, that she doesn’t trust. Something that won’t last and will leave  _ carnage _ behind it. She tilts her head and watches him press his blood into her glove, watches him turn to press his lips against her palm and smear it sticky and red across his mouth. It makes her shiver from the tips of her boots to the tops of her silly cat-ears. He squeezes her wrist, the gentlest pair of shackles she knows, and presses her palm against his cheek.  _ Come home, Selina _ . And there it was -- the mistletoe dripping off his lips, white berries and poison. Too much a monster to keep it hidden. It’s too much. It’s too much and she doesn’t have a predator’s mask of who she’s supposed to be, she’s not fearless now, and it  _ hurts _ to think about. The idea of being offered the last key instead of having to take it hurts, and scares, and she knows eventually he’ll take it away, and then the mistletoe will fester in her belly where she’d swallowed it and rot her away. It hurts. She doesn’t like feeling hurt. So she slides her hand out from against his cheek, stands on her tiptoes to kiss bloody lips and leave her own red lipstick _ smear _ across them, and she slides out under a raised arm, mask back on.

_ You’ll have to catch me first, Bats _ .


End file.
